Improving the Flow of Data to National Center of Biotechnology Information Sequence Repositories, SRA and Genbank

NCBI hosts repositories like SRA and GenBank for the archiving of DNA and RNA sequence data, annotations and associated metadata. These repositories have experienced significant growth in data deposition over the past few years. A Submission Portal (http://submit.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) is being developed to streamline the submission of sequence data and facilitate deposition of rich descriptive information about the biological sample and experimental metadata. Researchers can submit both the raw sequence reads for both genomic and RNA-Seq studies to SRA  (Sequence Read Archive), as well as the assemblies that are derived from these reads to the WGS (Whole Genome Shotgun) and TSA (Transcriptome Shotgun Assembly} resources.  There are programmatic and interactive web interfaces to the portal for both the informatics-rich genome center and the individual scientists.   Submission Portal provides set of web wizards that guide user through submissions process. Wizards incorporate interactive validation tools that provide immediate feedback on any data issues. Within the Submission Portal, users can obtain accession numbers, view error reports and query the status of their submission. A number of resources have been developed at NCBI to organize genomic sequencing efforts by initiative (BioProject), by specimen (BioSample), by genome (Assembly) or by organism (Genome). Each of these resources presents additional metadata to enhance our understanding of the sequence data and allows us to aggregate data in different ways. For instance, a BioProject may aggregate all submitted from a disease outbreak while a BioSample aggregates all submitted data from a single specimen. These new resources should aid users in navigating through the vast amount of sequence data present at NCBI.